Why do people hate mathematics?
With thanks to http://www.audible.com/numberphile Featuring Professor Edward Frenkel, from the University of California, Berkeley. Author of Love & Math. htt…
Video Rating: 4 / 5
With thanks to http://www.audible.com/numberphile Featuring Professor Edward Frenkel, from the University of California, Berkeley. Author of Love & Math. htt…
Video Rating: 4 / 5
If someone wants to transcribe the video for me, I will happily add a
caption file!
*How people who hate math could love math*
*even me*
The very charming author of *Love & Math* convinced me that math just
possibly might be of more interest to non-math types than I had thought.
And yes, +Alexandra Riecke-Gonzales, he might be just the teacher for us!
Maybe you can get him on the +SEOWiSE show?
#mathforkids
it’s insane seeing the amount of students had come to any of my classes
(when I taught) that would say they hated math, and trying to discuss with
them the ‘why’ of that, and turns out that they had early math teachers who
never really undestood the concepts themselves… so the ‘unease’ of math
was transferred from that terrible teacher to an entire generation of
students.
Great video, very well presented ideas from a very interesting person. For
Brady: Perhaps a nice idea would be to have other mathematicians
interviewed on the same question, and make a video series with their
opinions.
Wrong answer 😉 THIS IS WHY PEOPLE HATE MATHEMATICS!!! You all think we
have to marvel at it’s wonders and praise it like a god. This is why some
people think it’s the language of the devil. Not that I do because I’m not
religious but I understand their point. Mathematics are suppose to work on
a subconscious level. Just like when we are measuring distances. We did the
same calculations before and after Pythagoras discovered it’s laws. Pretty
strange, huh? How can we do an equation that hasn’t been discovered, in a
language we don’t understand? For millions of years? I’ll bet animals do it
the same way but how is that possible? How can a cow do the equation
involved in measuring a distance? This might even be related to why our
eyesight age so badly. If we try to be concious of the mathematics
involved, we would be completely unable to move, because we would NEVER get
done with the equations. Do you guys have ANY idea, how complicated it
would be, to lift your arm, if you had to calculate the problem? Your body
is a freaking quantum computer, and there’s NOTHING it can’t calculate, if
you feed it the right data and give it time. The result is what we call
“feelings”. You will lift you arm when you feel the need to and the cow
will take the accurate amount of steps needed to cover any distance. I will
dare to say, it’s always right and this is why you should always trust you
gut feeling. If you feed it false data, you will get false feelings but the
result is still right. Mathematics are the “source code” (right term?) and
conscious awareness of it, limits your ability use and bend it. I don’t
think buddhist monks are aware of the mathematics involved in what they are
doing but they seem pretty good at bending it’s laws. I know I’ll properly
have to take a lot of heat from this, but this is the world as I see it.
This is my understanding of quantum physics. I might be right and I might
be wrong but given the data I have come across, the “experiments” I’ve done
and a lot of thought processing, this is the result I’ve come up with 😀
The truth is an ongoing process though ;)))
*Mathematics is a lovely activity.*
I so agree about connecting math to our daily lives. This is a very good
interview.
I can think of….. Zillions and zillions of reasons. But that doesn’t
sound cool when I say it.
Please make a loop video just saying zillions repeatedly.
I tend to ask people in online games a simple question: 2+2*2=X
Entertain me. :D
I can relate to this… growing up through high school I always thought I
was terrible at math and I had no interest in it; it wasn’t until I had an
awesome professor in college and got into higher levels of math that I
became very interested and actually pretty good at it. It became a lot
easier than I thought
I think math is absolutely awesome! And I absolutely love it.
However, I think physics is cool as hell too. And it just seems more…
Tangible. Same with Chemistry.
I guess I sort of think of it as if math is a Second tier. Like Chemistry
and Physics describes interactions that we can see and feel. But Math
doesn’t really do that, Math is more of a tool that doesn’t directly
describe life but we can use it through physics and chemistry to describe
life.
Yes, it’s very important and useful to learn how to use a calculator. It’s
less important (though maybe more interesting) to know how the machine made
the calculator.
a year ago in high school i had a math teacher who sat down and taught me
trig and i was doing great in his class. but when ever any type of
break(including weekends)came along i completely forgot every thing i was
taught. for me math just goes in one ear and out the other, i honestly
don’t know how i got this far in school.
I hated art at school, I couldn’t even paint the fence.
I’m currently in high school. I can tell you why kids hate math.
Let’s start with why kids hate school. Seven hours a day, five days a week,
forty weeks a year, kids are forced to endure hell. Waking up at 6:30 to be
somewhere they don’t even want to be at 8:05, wandering around hallways
that are often worse than rush hour traffic, all to sit down, and be silent
for an hour to be lectured about something they usually don’t care about.
Then, they have a very short intermission before they have to sit down in
another place for another hour. In short, they’re bored. They just don’t
care, and I won’t claim innocence from this. I don’t care about what
happened thousands of years ago, I don’t care about old books. Now, I am
interested in math and science, but I seem to be the outlier. To most kids,
memorizing all of these theorems and postulates and formulas is nothing
more than a chore. As I know you’re aware, “When am I ever going to use
this?” is one of the most commonly asked questions in a math class, and
they’re right. Most people aren’t going to need to find the length of the
hypotenuse of a triangle based on its sides, or find the volume of a
sphere, and that’s some of the most “basic” stuff that’s taught. Also, the
work assigned by teachers is extremely tedious, and extremely boring. I
think most people will get the concept that the teacher is trying to teach
after about 5 examples. Assigning 30 or more, which I see often, is just
way too much. Now, I understand the thinking behind it. “Repetition,
repetition, repetition,” but again, kids get extremely bored of this
extremely quickly.
The problem isn’t the math, the problem is the way it’s taught. Teachers
need to give examples of how the math they’re teaching will be used in real
life, and the homework should be less of a chore. Unfortunately, I don’t
know how this would be achieved, but if nothing is done, the upcoming
generation will be one that thinks math to be boring, tedious, and useless,
and that is unacceptable.
I love math, I just suck at it :D
To save you 10 minutes, it’s because most people are stupid, lazy or both.
I’ve thought on things like this before.
The reason that people dislike maths is because they find it difficult and
unrewarding. It is unrewarding because it seems difficult. It seems
difficult to many because by the time they are studying it where it matters
they are already supposed to know the basics but don’t. I can’t speak for
other areas but in my classes I watched so many students doing assignments
where their difficulty was not always in understanding the way to find the
simplest form of a polynomial but in taking a long time to do it because
the smaller steps in the process were such work for them to complete.
Solving the problem is difficult because really what is needed is for maths
to become more prominent in our everyday language so that kids start
learning it before they ever see the inside of a school. Kids who talk at
home learn to talk quicker. Kids who read at home learn to read at a
higher level and faster. If kids did math at home they’d be more ready to
learn math when they got to school. The problem with something like that,
though, is that their parents don’t get it either. How can they teach what
they don’t understand?
Why Do People Hate Math? Because we are not good at it. Math is the only
subject I have failed in. I did pass it up until the fifth grade. That is
when I started do not understand it mostly because I initially did not
understand division. Then they through us into a bunch of assignments
involving division and I was like what? Then I got into algebra -_- Then
after that I figured Geometry would be easier…. I was mistaken…. Now I
do not know what to do. Where do I go from this? I suck at algebra and
geometry 🙁
I hated maths classes back at school and I was actually good at it too…
it was just so boring the way it had to be taught, my teacher was a good
teacher, when he goes off topic (but still mathematics related of course,
it was always interesting and fun), but sadly, he still had to stick to the
syllabus most of the time, as teachers are trained to teach exams, not
knowledge…
If you want to be good at mathematics, you need a born-with talent for it,
like drawing, singing and nearly anything else requires you to. No mater
how much I tried to practice and learn Math, i always failed, even at the
level of high school. Mind you my math teacher was such a hag you’d need a
silver sword to slay her…
Anyhow, I think most peole hate, or dislike math because they (like me)
lack the born-with talent it requires.
I barely passed my two years of Algebra in High School and I hated it.
However I loved Euclidean Geometry. I liked the way that everything was
Logical and each Proven Theorem built on another.
I believe that the great Ancient Mathematicians were clearly Left-Brained
Thinkers. They had to be—equations hadn’t yet been invented. Somewhere
along the line though, Mathematics was Highjacked by Right-Brained
Thinkers—nothing good comes from Right-Brain Maundering—and the idea of
Formal Proof was abandoned for the rather Whimsical Notion that solving
Equations is a Formal Proof.
And in College the virtuous Left-Brained Student struggling to
understand—when he asks the Inarticulate Undergraduate Teacher’s Assistant
for an EXPLANATION all he gets is another DEMONSTRATION.
It is like: “Hey Dude, if I could Learn by Osmosis—I’d have understood the
First 25 times that you demonstrated. What I need is an Articulate
Explanation how you know to go from step to step”
But the Student is Dazzled by the Bait-and-Switch, so he fails out of
College and ends up digging ditches for the rest of his life…
And Inarticulate Right-Brainers are to Blame.
…..RVM45
I don’t dislike mathematics, it dislikes me. However, I do know that I
dislike the overused “handy-cam” camera movement that’s been overdone to
death these days. It’s pretty tiresome to watch when the subject is
completely still yet there’s extreme movement of the camera like there’s
going to be some added cinematic “drama” while interviewing a mathematician
sitting in a chair.
People hate math because you can’t bargain with it. It’s either right or
wrong – period. There’s no room for negotiation. For that reason, unless
you’re a mathematician, on an elite level, there’s no room for creativity.
It’s not a form of personal expression. It’s only an understanding of exact
facts that cannot be altered.
It’s really, the ONLY subject on Earth that is like that.
For this reason, many people who actually do like math, tend to be the
sorts of people who are anti-creative, and only feel comfortable with exact
facts that leave no room for imagination or finagling. These people aren’t
good ambassadors to the rest of us.
When Mr. Frenkel talked about the “exposing maths to the public in an
accessible way” I simply had to think about Numberphile. This Channel is
basically the interface he is talking about. (Atleast to me. ;] I always
couldn’t really get myself to love maths, but atleast those videos here
show me the fun sides about it.)